Friday, 11 September 2015

What lurks beneath?

As those who check in regularly with this blog know we do
occasionally manage a bit of culture (films
and books), when it’s related to psychology and mental health. It’s a great pleasure
therefore, not only be able to talk about a new novel that goes into both
areas, but to interview the author.

Beth Miller is a novelist who used to be a psychologist
(she's got a doctorate that doesn't make it to her book covers). Her
most recent novel The Good Neighbour is part
domestic drama, part psychological thriller, part exploration of some scary
places in the human psyche. It starts in a nice street, in a nice town (Hove, actually), with nice neighbours. We initially see this through the eyes of
Minette, a rather bored stay-at-home mum, who makes friends with Cath: older,
feistier and coping incredibly with her son Davey’s illness. Under Cath’s
spirited influence Minette also becomes a different sort of friendly with the
hunky fellow down the road.

The job of interviewer isn't the easiest here as the story
is a craftily put together teaser where what’s going on is revealed bit by bit.
Spoiling would be bad form, but suffice to say that the niceness lasts for
about as long as the veneer in Blue Velvet,
and things quickly get complicated. Beth dropped into speak to us as part of a ‘blog tour’, a
modern phenomenon that was, I confess, new to me. We’re the only
psychology/mental health blog to nab her though, and we were pleased to be able
to ask her some questions about psychology, mental health in fiction and what lies beneath nice
neighbourhoods.

You ‘used’ to be a
psychologist. Putting aside whether psychology is something you can ever truly leave
(like the Catholic Church or the Mafia), why did you end up writing fiction?

Because it was
something to keep me occupied while I was in the witness protection programme,
following my middle-of-the-night escape from psychology. OK, not really. I have
always written, alongside my other work, and gradually the need to write became
more pressing, until it took centre-stage and I stopped doing my other work.

How does your background
in psychology influence your writing?

I don’t consciously
use the psychology I've learned in my novels, but I think it’s there, bubbling under the surface. I guess I retain the essential curiosity that propelled me
into psychology in the first place. Like many people, I'm fascinated about what
goes on behind the public faces of complicated people. Yes, I accept that curiosity
is another word for nosiness. If I see a couple having an argument, for
instance, I really want to know what it’s about, and have been known to loiter
near them, risking their wrath, to find out.

One of your
characters is identified as having pretty serious mental health problems. However,
you don’t really play that ‘mentally ill’ aspect up. I wondered why if you
thought of making more of it?

Once you give someone
in a story a label, you create expectations about that character, which then can
limit their options. Maybe the same is true in real life? Of course, having
expectations can be very useful, in that others know, or at least think they
know, how to react to someone with a particular label. But I didn't want to direct
the reader as to how they should think and feel about this character (whom I’ll
call Chris, to save me having to type ‘this character’ every time). I didn't want it to be ‘this is a story about Chris who has X diagnosis.’ Although Chris
does have some psychological problems, I was interested not so much in the name
or origin of the problems, but more in the unique ways Chris deals with them.
In general, I think I'm interested in the unique way we all deal with our
problems, whether we call them mental health problems or not. Fiction has a
tendency to treat people with mental health problems as either unremittingly
bad, or as saintly and wise. I hope I have portrayed a more real and nuanced
person.

And I didn’t want it
to be an ‘issues’ book. One of the other characters says something like, just
because someone’s been diagnosed with something doesn't mean that you
necessarily understand them any better. That’s how I feel. I don’t think labels
necessarily help you understand, though they sometimes feel as if they do.

The Good Neighbour
explores the mundaneness of everyday life and also the terrible things that
people can sometimes do to one and other. What drew you to both types of
material?

Good question! I am
very interested in the layers of extraordinariness that lie just under the
surface of everyday life. How you can just be going about your usual day and
then one new little thing happens: someone falls down the stairs, or a car
breaks down, or an unexpected letter arrives, and the whole of a person’s life
takes a different path to the one it was heading down. And I am also very
interested in the terrible things people do to each other – in fact, I'm drawn
towards exploring them out of grim fascination. I want to know why someone does
the terrible and seemingly inexplicable thing they do. Because presumably they
have reasons, however hard those might be for us to accept, and however unaware
they might be of them. It seems to me that in their different ways, psychology
and fiction are both quite useful methods for going inside a person’s head and
trying to figure out why they do what they do.

Depending on whom you
talk to we’re either in one of the most violent and scary periods in human history or in one of the safest. Should we be worrying more about our neighbours?

I don’t think so. I
tend to wander round assuming people are nice until I’m proved wrong. I think
that’s at least as good a principle as assuming everyone’s awful. As the book
is called The Good neighbour, I ought to say on the record that of course all
my neighbours are lovely (though I believe some people are less lucky).

About the Salomons Centre

The Salomons Centre for Applied Psychology in Tunbridge Wells, England. We are part of the Canterbury Christ church University Department of Psychology, Politics and Sociology. We run training courses in Clinical Psychology and CBT and also practice improvement programmes for child and adolescent mental health services. On this site staff and trainees in the Department write about a wide range of issues related to applied psychology, psychological therapies, policy and health service development.